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A Connectionist account of Spanish determiner production

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A Connectionist Network that models the production of simple phonologically coded Spanish Noun Phrases is described. The training data uses type/token frequencies taken directly from a Spanish child&#39;s linguistic environment. The training set

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A connectionist account of Spanish determiner produc-tion
Journal Article
How to cite:
Smith, Pamela; Nix, Andrew; Davey, Neil and Messer, David (2003). A connectionist account of Span-ish determiner production. Journal of Child Language, 30(2), pp. 305–331.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c

[not recorded]Version: [not recorded]Link(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0305000903005622Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copy-right owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consultthe policies page.
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A connectionist account of Spanish determinerproduction*
PAMELA SMITH
Department of Psychology
,
University of Hertfordshire
,
U.K.
ANDREW NIX, NEIL DAVEY
Department of Computer Science
,
University of Hertfordshire
,
U.K.
SUSANA LO´PEZ ORNAT
Facultad de Psicologı´a
,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
,
Spain
AND
DAVID MESSER
Division of Psychology
,
South Bank University
,
London
,
U.K.
(
Received
10
December
1997
. Revised
23
October
2002)
ABSTRACT
Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children’s productionof determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cuespresent in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender todeterminers (Pe´rez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also dem-onstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correctdeterminer when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest itis masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns withambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cuesavailable to children and seek to explore the possibility that diﬀerentialfrequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculineforms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connec-tionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained ona lexicon of determiner–noun phrases taken from parental speech in
[*] Andrew Nix was funded by a University of Hertfordshire Research Studentship. Thework was also aided by a British Council travel grant as part of the British/Spanish JointResearch Programme (AccionesIntegradas) 1995/96. The ordering of the secondto fourthauthors is completely arbitrary and not indicative of amount of input involved in thepreparation of this manuscript. Address for correspondence: Professor David Messer,Division of Psychology, South Bank University, Southwark Campus, 103 Borough Road,London SE1 0AA, UK. e-mail: messerdj@sbu.ac.uk
J. Child Lang.
30
(2003), 305–331.
f
2003 Cambridge University PressDOI: 10.1017/S0305000903005622 Printed in the United Kingdom
305
a longitudinal study of a child between the ages of 1;7 and 2;11(Lo´pez Ornat, Fernandez, Gallo & Mariscal, 1994) preserving the typeand token frequency information. An analysis of the database of parentalproductions revealed that while regular feminine nouns were slightlymore frequent than regular masculine nouns, irregular masculine nounsoutnumbered irregular feminine nouns by roughly 2 to 1. On the basisof this, we made the prediction that as the training lexicon builds up,the network will perform better overall on masculine determiners thanwould be predicted from their forms alone and will tend to assign mas-culine gender to ambiguous novel nouns in a test set. The ﬁndings indi-catethat,atleastinthecaseofSpanishgenderagreementfordeterminersand nouns, a general associative learning mechanism can account forimportant characteristics of the acquisition process seen in children.
INTRODUCTION
Over the past ﬁfteen years, several groups of researchers in cognitive psycho-linguistics have been using the connectionist paradigm to investigate theprocesses and representations which govern the acquisition and developmentof language in young children (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; Mac-Whinney, Leinbach, Taraban & McDonald, 1989; Elman, 1993; Plunkett &Marchman, 1993). The appeal of connectionist systems has been their abilityto produce developmental patterns of behaviour similar to those observedin young children, without the need for an explicitly programmed set of rules and parameters. Their ability to produce complex, dynamic patternsof behaviour using a simple mechanism and learning rule has led to a majorreassessment of whether humans come innately pre-programmed withnatural language or whether language is an emergent property of the dynamicinteraction between the developing cortex and the linguistic environment(Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloﬀ-Smith, Parisi & Plunkett, 1996).The argument that general learning mechanisms can account for theacquisition of language requires supporting evidence from all aspects of language. Our work aims to show how a connectionist model, with a devel-opmental dimension, supports this claim with respect to the acquisition of gender agreement in Spanish determiner-noun phrases.
1
Determiners areobligatory in most contexts in Spanish and must agree with the gender of thenoun. Connectionist models can be vulnerable to the criticism that the datagiven to the model, and the training regime implemented, are far removedfrom real life phenomena and hence are not valid tests of theories of language
[1] We have restricted our discussion to monolingual children acquiring Castilian Spanish inaccordance with the views expressed by Lo´pez Ornat, on the dangers of conﬂatingphenomena presented by monolingual and bilingual children learning a variety of Spanishtongues (Lo´pez Ornat, 1988).
SMITH
ET AL
.306
acquisition. We address these problems in two ways: the data given to themodel is provided by real language spoken in the hearing of a real child andthe training regime mirrors the incremental expansion of that language inputover an eighteen month period.Nominal gender systems have been classiﬁed by Corbett & Fraser (2000)into three main groups. In the ﬁrst group are those languages where thegender of a noun is wholly predictable from semantic assignment withoutreference to form, for example, Godoberi, a minority language in Daghestan,which has three genders: male rational, female rational and other. Anotherexample is Zande, a language spoken in central Africa, which has four gen-ders: male human, female human, other animate, the rest (with some overlapbetween the latter two classes). In the second group of languages are thosewhere gender is predictable from natural sexual gender and phonology,e.g. Qafar, spoken in Ethiopia, with two genders where ﬁnal stressed vowelsdenote female sex and feminine nouns and all other endings denote male sexand masculine nouns. In the third group are languages such as Russian (andGerman although this is not an example given by Corbett & Fraser) whichrequire,forallnounsoutsidenatural sexualgender,aknowledgeoftheinﬂec-tionalbehaviourofanouninordertoidentifygender.Spanish,notmentionedby Corbett & Fraser, lies between the transparency of the ﬁrst two classes andthe complexity of the third: semantic assignment is limited to some sexuallydiﬀerentiable referents and phonology only provides limited cues.Thus gender agreement in Spanish is interesting because gender cannotbe easily and reliably recovered from semantics, morphology or phonologyalthough each plays a part. Indeed this lack of consistency in gender assign-ment to Spanish nouns has led Ambadiang (1999, p. 4874) to call for dataon acquisition in the hope of identifying the cues which result in adultcompetence.The assignment of gender to Spanish nouns has little connection withnatural or semantic gender except in the case of some animate objects (Kar-miloﬀ-Smith, 1979; Pe´rez-Pereira, 1991). For these nouns the same stem isgiven an -
o
ending for the male and an -
a
ending for the female. This holdstrue for many of the people a very young child is likely to encounter, e.g.
hermano/hermana
‘brother/sister’,
nin˜o/nin˜a
‘child’,
chico/chica
‘boy/girl’,
primo/prima
‘cousin’,
tı´o/tı´a
‘uncle/aunt’,
abuelo/abuela
‘grandfather/grand-mother’,
enfermero/enfermera
‘nurse’. It also holds for a few, frequently en-countered, animals, e.g.
perro/perra
‘dog/bitch’,
gato/gata
‘cat’. At ﬁrst sightthis looks as if it would be possible for children to identify a morphologi-cal rule during acquisition, with exceptions such as
padre/madre
‘father/mother’,
papa´/mama´
‘daddy/mummy’,
nene/nena
‘toddler’,
bebe´
‘baby’(m&f),
dentista
‘dentist’ (m&f) and
medico
‘doctor’ (m&f) being learned byrote and stored as items in the lexicon in line with predictions from thedual-route model of the acqusition of morphology (Pinker & Prince, 1994).
ACQUISITION OF SPANISH DETERMINERS
307
But gender suﬃxes do not even extend to most animals. They have eithertwo independent words, e.g.
caballo/yegna
‘horse/mare’ or an invariantform, e.g.
girafa
(f) ‘giraﬀe’,
gorilla
(
m
) with sex identiﬁed by an adjective,e.g.
la girafa macho
‘the male giraﬀe’,
el gorila hembra
‘the female gorilla’.Moreover once outside the animate class, nouns for inanimate objects seemto be ascribed gender in an arbitrary fashion. A small girl getting dressedis faced with masculine
vestido
‘dress’,
abrigo
‘coat’,
calcetines
‘socks’ and
zapatos
‘shoes’, while
falda
‘skirt’,
camisa
‘shirt’,
bragas
‘underpants’ and
botas
‘boots’ are feminine. Spanish nouns for knife, fork and saucer are mas-culine and for kitchen knife, spoon and cup are feminine. In this separationof semantics and linguistic gender, Spanish is similar to other languages.MacWhinney
et al
. (1989) give similar German examples where fork isfeminine, knife is neuter and spoon is masculine. The word for soap is mas-culine in French and Spanish, while in German it is feminine and inRussian it is neuter (Karmiloﬀ-Smith, 1979).Semantics are thus of limited use to the learner of gender agreement (seeTables 2 and 3). Morphology is also of limited use: there are no gendermorphemes in Spanish nouns: no suﬃxes, preﬁxes or inﬁxes. It might beargued that ﬁnal -
o
and -
a
are gender bearing morphemes but this is only truefor a limited class of animates as discussed above. Outside this class wordsdiﬀering only in these ﬁnal vowels signify unrelated referents as in
libro
‘book’ and
libra
‘pound’ and
suelo
‘ﬂoor’ and
suela
‘shoe sole’ (Ambadiang,1999). It is perhaps more appropriate to describe these ﬁnal vowels asphonological cues, an issue to which we return.The determiners (which precede nouns in Spanish) also present problems.Although feminine singular and plural determiners are regular in form withan -
a
ending in the singular and an -
as
ending in the plural, masculinesingular determiners take a variety of forms (see Table 1) although the pluralends in a regular -
os
.The class of feminine nouns starting with stressed
a-
takes the masculinesingular determiner but the feminine plural determiner, e.g.
el agua
‘thewater’ but
las aguas
‘the waters’. This form of the singular determiner can
TABLE
1.
The Spanish determiners used in the present study
DeterminerFeminine MasculineSingular Plural Singular PluralDeﬁnite la las el losIndeﬁnite una unas un unosDemonstrative 1 esa esas ese esosDemonstrative 2 esta estas este estosComparative otra otras otro otros
SMITH
ET AL
.308

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